The friendly freak fraternity

Pamela Mason’s papier mâché universe

She looks pretty disarming, the human
equivalent of a cease-fire agreement. It’s not that she’s tiny, though she is a
little slight. Nor is it the barrette, icon of innocence, pinning her bangs to
the rest of her long, black hair. Those things are beside the point. People
drop their weapons because of an aura, something projected from within.

A lot of people get that vibe, Pamela Mason
says, and a good deal of them are shocked at the apparent contrast between her
and the art she creates. Creatures, all of them, they have skeletons of chicken
wire, embellishments fashioned from wine corks or chop sticks, and skin
smoothed out of papier mâché. Colourful bunnies with spiralling eyeballs, paws
propped out in old fashioned zombie insistence. A mobile of tiny fish, their
gaping mouths lined with craggy teeth. A bigger fish, oblong, with big, black,
beady eyes staring off into the rest of her workspace, a smaller one frozen in
its huge mouth. And this funky thing with three heads — cow, bunny,
rooster — looking for all the world like it’s about to call a limo and
head out for a black tie dinner.

“My eye is always drawn towards bright,
colourful, happy, pretty things, as trite as that sounds,” she says. “The thing
my mind always goes back to is accepting everything for what it is. And I try
as hard as I can to be non-judgmental.”

But there’s no shortage of gavels in this
world, and most everyone has done their share of pounding, even if
unconsciously. If her creatures are ambassadors of deeper acceptance, then
they’ve got their work cut out for them. Mason sometimes takes her freaks to
the Squamish and Whistler markets, where they’re often viewed as fierce, maybe
even hideous.

“Parents will walk by with their children and
say, ‘Look at those teeth. You can’t have that; it’s too scary.’ Well, a kid
doesn’t know that teeth are scary until you tell them so.”

But alack: Isn’t that so often the way?

“I almost feel like I’m helping in the sense
that it is really important to forget what something looks like on the outside
because the most important thing is on the inside.”

What informs all this? Mason is from a farming
community near London, Ontario. She respectfully calls her family conventional,
then explains her station on the weird side of that arrangement and the edgy
sense of humour she developed as a result. She left the flatlands seven years
ago, arriving in the Sea to Sky corridor as an artist-to-be.

It took a broken knee to get things going. On
the lam, she began making things for her friends, falling for the pliable
promise of papier mâché and the sometimes surprising forms the medium
guarantees. In the ensuing years, whether living in Pemberton or Whistler,
Squamish or Vancouver, even out in Tofino, she began showing her work in cafés,
sushi bars and clothing stores. She digs Whistler’s Blind Mute Productions, and
her freaks parade their insides and out during the gallery’s exhibitions. She’s
even taken some work to Nevada’s Burning Man.

Inspiration is hard to pin down. Because we
are a society that relies in part on comparison for understanding, let’s
briefly play that game. Certainly, there’s a bit of Tim Burton here, something
she hears a lot. Picture the characters from
The Nightmare Before Christmas,
Beetlejuice
and
Corpse Bride
, and you’re getting somewhere near her style. Except, rather than a
classical score, have those tweakers lilting around to Mr. Bungle’s “Goodbye
Sober Day.” Now you’re closer still. Finally, throw in the magic of underwater
life, all those amorphous shapes, those phosphorescent light shows. See it?

Also, always hold on to your wag; this is
supposed to be fun.

“People ask me why I’m so angry,” she says.
“They ask me what’s wrong with me and what am I suppressing. But I’m not angry
at all. I think they’re funny.”

Mason is taking her doctrine of inner beauty
and humour to the world of children’s books. That seed has long been in her
mind, germinating slowly, and now finally coming to fruition in the wake of
this year’s Burning Man. A gaggle of her misfits will wade into situations that
pronounce their inner kindness, and acceptance will be the order of the day.

Mason’s work is for sale. And not just the
creatures, but also pins, stickers and articles from a budding clothing line.
You can contact her at
leotamason@hotmail.com
.